by Evelyn Piper
Now it was a tug of war between the two girls. Definitely, Wilson thought: go with Blanche, stay with Louise. Go out into the night with the unknown or go up those stairs to the known. The lady directress he can count on, or Blanche who he can never be sure wouldn’t have shot him! If he goes with Mademoiselle Blanche, it’s for keeps now, not just for psychiatry.
Wilson pressed his hand against his throbbing shoulder and gritted his teeth. Waiting, he fought off the swirling black, the dark unconsciousness.
“Hurry up,” he said, “make up your mind, Dennis! Come on, Dennis . . . the lady or the tiger?”
AFTERWORD
In 1957, the year three-year-old Bunny (real name Felicia) Lake is reported missing in the novel that bears her name, Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize, popular tastes were slaked by James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed and William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Henry James’s psychological thriller found strange new tones in Benjamin Britten’s opera Turn of the Screw, Eugene O’Neill was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Samuel Beckett’s Hamm insisted on playing out his exhausted hand in Endgame. Into this region of darkness and absurdity Evelyn Piper’s fair, unsuspecting heroine, Blanche Lake, makes her way, searching for the daughter who vanished without a trace on her first day of nursery school. By day’s and story’s end, she will have journeyed deep into the black night in which the demented and mournful beings of mid-century modern imagining lived out their tormented existence.
Blanche, as her name suggests, hardly seems the type to seek, much less find, herself at home in the company of these creatures of darkness. She enters the novel fully expecting to make a place for herself—and, of course, for Bunny—in the insistently light and airy, brightly colored world of post-war urban America. Her first visit to Bunny’s nursery school reassures her in these hopes with its cheerful spectrum of well-administered life: there are the friendly mothers in gray and bright-blue slacks, a caretaker Blanche calls Orange Smock after her sunny uniform, and even a teacher whose name, Miss Green, is happily suggestive of verdant growth. She is so convinced of the fundamentally benign order of the world that she talks—mainly to herself, but that is when talk is a fairly accurate indication of state of mind—as if the language of a three-year-old is all the language one needs to brave the adventures and surmount the accidents of life. The most ordinary events of the day occasion an almost comic, even imbecilic astonishment: “She wondered if it would be all right to ask Bunny’s teacher—how ridiculous—Bunny’s teacher—how Bunny had taken her first day in school. Had she made friends? (Made friends—Bunny!)” She seems, in short, just the sort of young woman who would translate Felicia—a name signifying happiness—into the diminutive, huggable form of a bunny. How could she suspect that the door to the nursery school, “modernized” according to the most advanced educational and architectural ideas, would prove to be, as the title of the movie playing nearby advertises, The Gate of Hell, that she would soon be speaking a language so urgent and despairing that those hearing her could only take it to be the language of madness, and that, unknown even to herself, beneath her mild if fretful manner lurks a tiger who will be uncaged in the last pages of the book?
Such playing against type—the high-class lady with low-loin tastes, the murderous doctor, the psychopathic nanny—is the trademark of Merriam Modell, writing under the name of Evelyn Piper. The unassuming, ethnically unreadable pseudonym disguises both her Jewishness and the insinuating strangeness of her unnerving satires on the culture of love, marriage, and child-rearing in midcentury America. After graduating from Cornell University in the late 1920s, she worked variously as a model and secretary (including service to a harmonica quartet), joined the postwar migration of Americans to Europe, and lived in Germany until 1933, when she married and returned to the United States. There is little hope and less knowledge of this larger cosmopolitan world for the cloistered, often timorous, and self-baffled protagonists of her masterworks, The Lady and Her Doctor, Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Nanny. As a writer, Piper reserved her sense of adventure, in the best modern manner, for explorations of the undiscovered or seldom visited territories within the mind.
In Bunny Lake Is Missing, the mind to be explored, first with bemused condescension, then with sympathy, finally with alarm, belongs to Blanche Lake, an unmarried mother who has recently come to New York to create a new life for herself and her child. When her daughter disappears, a search is launched and an investigation mounted that fails to turn up any sign of Bunny’s whereabouts or even of her existence. The police, the school director, and the psychiatrist summoned to assist and calm this understandably anxious female begin to suspect that Bunny is a figment of Blanche’s imagination. Soon Blanche finds herself facing two related, but psychologically quite different, ordeals: finding Bunny and proving that she exists. The first ordeal tests her moral fitness for motherhood by thrusting her into the role of frantic mother. Maternal protectiveness, at least in fiction, is generally cloying, unless and until it is needed, and then it becomes heroic.1 This form of female heroism is lamentably unsung, may even go unnoticed, a point made with startling and heartbreaking clarity by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s masterpiece of ruthlessly protective mother love, The Blank Wall (1947; adapted in 1949 to film as The Reckless Moment and in 2001 as The Deep End).
Blanche’s nervous concern for Bunny on her first day of school is understandable, indeed commonplace, but it does not recommend her to us as a possible heroine. If anything, it consigns her to the satiric ranks of doting mothers whose effusions tire everyone and are credited by no one except themselves. She arouses our interest only when Bunny cannot be found, and even then only because she surprises us with her fierce ingenuity in tracking down her child. Our interest is intensified when Blanche acquires a dark double, Mrs. Negrito, the greengrocer whose son, Eddie, patently infatuated with Blanche, is also missing (he, in fact, is the first “missing person” of the book). Blanche and Negrito, white and black, pale heroine and swarthy immigrant, are sisters under the skin (later we learn that Mrs. Negrito, too, has a colorful name, Rose). They are emotionally and narratively joined in a tireless search for their missing children. Each is desperate to rescue her child from harm, Blanche from the harm that may befall Bunny, Mrs. Negrito from the harm her son may do. But unlike Mrs. Negrito, Blanche, in her role as frantic mother, is compromised by the second ordeal to which she is quickly subjected, which tests her moral fitness not for motherhood, but for reality.
At first, it is not certain which charge is more damning—that she is a bad mother2 or that she is a fantasist. What is certain—and startling—is how quickly Blanche is branded a bad mother even before Bunny is officially declared missing. When she returns to the school with a policeman to search the cellar where Bunny might have wandered, she is taunted by reproving bystanders: “And where was she so the kid got locked up? Late? Couldn’t leave the television set! Call themselves mothers sending tiny little babies to school! All day long, too!” Although the voice of this accusatory chorus never rises above the level of ideological background noise, it does have the power to unnerve Blanche and bring her, emotionally, to the bar of judgment. “If anything’s happened it’s a judgment, that’s what I say! That’s what they learn them in college—how to drop their kids and leave them for others to take care of . . .” Judgment is rendered without making clear which offending sin is the more grievous—mothers relinquishing their children to the care of others or the education of women that puts the thought in their head. Blanche is made the scapegoat for modernity itself, with its new social arrangements, educated and working women, increased leisure time, and mass entertainments.
But however spiteful and retrograde, the actual idea and prospect of judgment are never discredited, much less dismissed, as the explanation of why Bunny Lake is missing. Instead, the thought of judgment is internalized, where it takes on the authority and form of spiritual terror. Dr. Dennis Newh
ouse, the psychiatrist dispatched by his lover, the head of Bunny’s school, to calm her anxious and apparently delusional client, reads Bunny’s “disappearance” just this way—as a judgment Blanche has rendered against herself. With surgical skill, he extracts the secret wish that shadows her doting motherhood: “You see, before I was sure that Bunny was coming, I prayed not to have a baby. I was so frightened.” Armed with the unanswerable logic of his tribe, he confronts her with the dark syllogism he believes to have been crafted by her unconscious mind: She prayed not to have a baby; she had a baby; Bunny’s disappearance is thus a delayed wish fulfillment, a finally answered prayer. Blanche turns “chalky white” on hearing this pronouncement. Piper’s wicked wit gives us this blanching Blanche at the very moment when her rosy maternal demeanor is drained of its color and credibility. The appalled Blanche is a pitiable figure onto which Newhouse projects the bleak truth unearthed by the modern science of mind: “No God so implacable as self.”
The God of self is a puritanical God (“No God, anywhere, so lacking in mercy”) whose decrees have taken root in the American psyche and still produce strange fruits:
The old expression “the woman pays” flashed through Dennis’s mind, because she did, of course. Because this was payment. Friend or no, lucky or no, broad minded or not, this girl believed she was a wicked girl and that she should be stoned through the streets with a big red letter “A” on her bosom.
Blanche, however, resists being cast as a contemporary Hester Prynne, not because Newhouse is right—for according to Freudian dogma, the truth of the unconscious can be detected by the resistance it provokes—but because his diagnosis is too literary (and Bunny is real!), and because she is already beginning to suspect that the man who has come to ease her mind has become increasingly agitated in his own. His is a mind filled, as Freudian scriptures were filled, with Victorian notions of a woman’s capacity to excite and to feel sexual guilt. He is too fond of the old expression “the woman pays,” and too eager to confirm its authority. He is slow to realize that Blanche belongs to a new age, whose sexual motto is not “the woman pays,” but that declaration of independence, “I am paying my own way.”
Newhouse hears but cannot understand the terms of this emancipated idiom. He can only see Blanche as an anxious, self-condemning waif in a pantomime, her “little soft hands wringing like the hands of heroines in old-fashioned books.” His sexual tastes and gender paradigms thus make an irony of his name. Newhouse mentally confines Blanche to the old house of Victorian morality and its self-affrighting language in which girls are “wicked” and the mind can come “undone” by unrestrained longings. Yet it is not Blanche but Newhouse who is undone by his own dark attraction to Blanche’s soft and feverish body, her whiteness especially. He is drawn to her as once, as a medical student, he was irresistibly drawn to a cast of a dead girl drowned in the Seine, “so cold, so white, so . . . Marble. Lips meant for marble.”
Amour was never more fou. Drawn to each other over the brink of the madness that awaits them both, the parties in this strangely matched couple confront each other at that proverbial crossroads where lovers declare their passion for each other. Their moment of reckoning is not just star crossed, but genre crossed. Newhouse addresses her with the tender but strict formality of a Victorian suitor, while Blanche, “undone” but not unnerved by her ordeal, assumes the fierce and vengeful mask of the female desperado steadying herself for the final shoot-out with her lover, her enemy. She waits inside some corral of the mind, curling her finger around the trigger of the gun she has found and appropriated, waiting for the “next betraying, rotten, lying word [to come] out of his mouth. . . . It would be easy, she thought. They had made it easy, she thought. She wasn’t the girl who closed her eyes when there was going to be killing (even in Westerns); she was a Western now; her trigger finger itched; it did. She waited almost impatiently for this final betrayal.”
Blanche may not have yet stepped over the boundaries of sanity, but she has crossed over the borders of convention, of genre convention, that is, exchanging the soft voice, babbling endearments, and doting affections of the beleaguered heroine of Victorian melodrama (a central, palpitating figure in Freudian storytelling) for the pitiless words and deadly weapons of the gunslinger, impatient for the satisfying catharsis of blood. All of the concentrated moral force and emotional impatience of the Western is compressed in Blanche’s itchy trigger finger. No God as implacable as self, indeed, but now the self is no self-accuser but a dark avenger. Her target is not just the man who has betrayed her, but the “pure Victoriana” that casts her in the role of helpless, if wicked, girl who must pay, who must wear a scarlet “A” on her chest until she is redeemed by the forgiving love of a good man. Her enemy is her rescuer, Newhouse, who has himself come undone: “It was the tension and trembling of his voice as he had said the formal ‘Miss’ that had undone him. Undone. Yes. Precisely, the Victorian word was precise. The thing had been pure Victoriana: Miss Lake, may I ask you for the honor of your hand in marriage? The formal address spoken into the soft night in a voice which had trembled appropriately had led to the ‘I love you,’ which was, when you understood it, perfectly rational.” What we do understand is that Newhouse’s rationality is confounded by “the tumult and tumbling inside himself.” Blanche’s hand and her mind are perfectly steady, if itching to get on with show. The rational doctor trembles like a maiden, while the distressed and delusory female is virile in her singleness of purpose. No God so implacable as self, yes, but Blanche has become that godless figure, the woman who has no self, who has only a mission—to find her child and avenge her sex. She now despairs of finding her child since no one believes there is a child to be found. She may at least take revenge for the many betrayals of love on her rival, Newhouse’s lover: “She’ll suffer, all right. She’ll suffer. She’ll pay.” Having lost her self, she has lost her God. She will put her faith only in that dreadful power of life and death that can be sighted along the barrel of a gun. It is to this savage belief that Blanche pledges her allegiance: “In gun I trust.”
This motto also serves as a passport admitting her into the raw and wicked territory of pulp. To plot a course through this dark, hard land she needs a guide. She thinks she has found him in Mr. Wilson, an unsuccessful writer and a neighbor who had once been friendly to her. Wilson should be able to help her since what she requires is part of his stock and trade as a writer—the means to make people believe in your version of reality. At first he, like everyone she encounters, dismisses her frantic ravings as fraudulent, if not lunatic. This may be ungallant, but at least he doesn’t see her as a heroine in an old-fashioned melodrama. “Stop making like Pearl White!” he sneers, evoking, in one of the better plays on Blanche’s name, the silent screen’s radiant icon of imperiled womanhood, literally so in her most famous role in The Perils of Pauline.3 “You don’t know what trouble is, Mademoiselle Blanche; you’re not a writer. Sick—sick writer! Sick writer!” All the more reason to believe that he is the man for the job! But on hearing her strange and improbable tale, Wilson thinks she has been sent by his wife to mock him in his writer’s den and greets her with some high mockery of his own: “Of course I believe you! Nobody else would, but I do! If the rest of them won’t, it’s because they don’t know that truth is stranger than any tired fiction.” He advises her to play out the melodrama to its conventional end, reminding her that in such desperate cases, the river awaits (he even gives her directions). Wilson is condescending and brutally dismissive; still he does not speak to her in the language one reserves for delicate or delusional minds. What he doesn’t know is that he is addressing someone potentially sicker, and certainly more desperate, than himself. Wilson’s distress results not from missing something in the world, but in himself. In his own eyes, he is “a nothing since not a good writer; a nothing because surely not a good man.” This is not a kind, nor is it an especially accurate, self-judgment. He will turn out to be, if not a good writer, someone who knows what
a good—and credible—story is. In the course of the black night ahead, he will also prove himself surely to be a good man on whose fundamental kindness and writerly insight the resolution of Blanche’s and Piper’s story will depend. But in this first encounter, Wilson seems just another character in Piper’s gallery of urban grotesques, “a nothing” with one eye smaller than another and a heart as cold as stone: “Newhouse thinks you’re crazy but me, being a writer myself, you come to me? I’m supposed to have more imagination, is that it? I hobnob with queer ducks and queerer drakes?”4
This, last line, I like to think, may have inspired Penelope and John Mortimer in adapting and “updating” Piper’s novel for Otto Preminger’s 1965 film. Preminger’s film shifts the scene from the tense streets of 1950s New York to an upscale London that, with its manicured town houses and cozy pubs, is as much village as modern metropolis. But what Preminger loses by forgoing the disquieting cityscape of American noir—the deserted el stations, darkened playgrounds, and friendless streets—he recuperates by peopling his film with a lively and enthralling assortment of queer ducks and queerer drakes. The novel’s physically disconcerting, gruff, but finally benign Mr. Wilson does not consort with queer ducks in Preminger’s film—he is one. As deliciously played by Noel Coward, Wilson is not just a writer, or as he describes himself, “a poet, playwright and dropper of alcoholic bricks.” He is also Blanche’s sexually omnivorous, predatory landlord with distinctly sadomasochistic tastes. Given his “adults only” proclivities, Wilson can hardly bear the thought, much less the presence, of children, as evidenced in his lease contract, which stipulates, as he reminds Blanche on learning of Bunny’s not-yet-contested existence, “no caged birds, no cats, no livestock of any kind.” He is thus not someone who might help to dispel Blanche’s nightmare; he is much more likely to lure her into one of his own making. He tries (improbably) to seduce her with his “melodious” voice and collection of “African heads, small pickled ones” and, when rebuffed, dismisses her in turn by proudly boasting of his more heroic conquests: “There are those at the BBC who bear, like medals, the bruises left by the love of Horatio Wilson.” When the police come to question him, he proudly shows them his collection of whips, singling out his favorite “plaything,” a whip “reputed to belong to the Great One himself,” and politely asking if they would “care to have a bash.” This not being Wilson’s day, they decline the offer; undeterred he obligingly points out the skull also reputed to have belonged to the Great One—the Marquis de Sade—or so he was assured by the vendor who sold it to him in the Caledonian Market.